“. . . the ability to stand out naked.”
“At the time of leaving the studio, being exhibited, some works take on the immediate presence of a shower, the ability to stand out naked,” Dale Frank tells me about Growers and Showers, “appearing more significant than others. While other works that may appear on the first showing as lesser works, in the course of time, and later viewings, take on a strength from within, to grow greater in significance.”
A survey of works created across a decade (between 2012 and 2022, ostensibly) and shown across two floors, this exhibition presents more than forty large-scale paintings, sculptures and installations and includes nine never-before-exhibited works. “The nine previously unseen works are several large canvas tinted varnish paintings from 2012 and 2013,” the artist explains. Other unseen works include several small paintings and a behavioural sculpture from 2020, A Grand Canyon, recreated for the exhibition’s opening night.
Dale Frank, Malcolm, 39yo, and Travis, 31yo, share a caravan at Country Acres Cara Park on Maison Dieu Road, and work together at Polymer Innovations 400 meters up the same road manufacturing artificial snow and have the sort of relationship where they get excited enjoying the sexual thrill of watching each other piss together into the vats of fake snow but they drink so much coffee all day that their piss is always a pinky dark brown colour, and they never get away with it and are constantly fined twenty dollars each by the Safety Officer with the fine going towards the annual Christmas party, 2022, colour pigments in epoxyglass, epoxyglass, on Perspex, 200 × 200cm. Courtesy the artist and NAS Galleries, Sydney
Frank is known for vividly coloured abstract paintings and an experimental ethos. This exhibition seemingly keen to capture something of the artist’s “expanded painting practice.” Frank’s signature poured resin works are presented in this survey alongside works using mirror, shattered glass, foam, and foil ducting, among other unexpected surfaces. As coloured lights, sound and a fog machine immerse the visitor in a contemplation with Frank’s practice and certain ideas, such as, what constitutes painting?
“It was more important to present a showing that was exciting, showing glimpses of some material exploration aspects,” Frank says when asked what the exhibition has to tell us about his relationship to materiality. “It was not possible to present an examination of every diverse material.” Further, Frank does not claim to know what it is that a survey such as this “gives the viewer.” A self-reflectiveness that, to my eye, captures something of the point of a practice such as Frank’s.
“The last few paintings the artist manifested determines its siblings, its offspring and if the materiality of that manifested painting determines further journey, the artist is obliged by the very nature of his profession, to take that journey, to the ‘edge’ or into a dead end laneway, it makes absolutely no difference.”
Dale Frank, Saint Petersburg, 2017, human hair wigs on Perspex, 200 × 200cm. Courtesy the artist and NAS Galleries, Sydney
Here’s a practice, clearly, open to exploring and sense-making in an unfixed and unabashed way; where a “let’s see” relation to materials and mediums and, indeed, the very conceptions of what constitutes a category like painting is embraced in an individual and in an art sense. This survey’s an ambitious undertaking and one, the artist admits, that “could not accommodate many of the different significant journeys with many differing materials, but we were able to include one or two examples of a few of these journeys.”
Here’s a show in which readymades as culturally loaded as clown masks and human hair wigs come to take the place of paint entirely in certain works, growing the canvas in a three-dimensional way, but also showering – again, to my eye – the viewer with similar poured, swirling qualities that can also be found in the more ostensibly home-tied journeys on show for us to move through. A recent series, for instance, where the use of translucent dye hones a more recognisably-Frank technique, with varying colour outcomes.
“Painting, art, is a business, a profession, in every sense. In this business, the artist must,” Frank tells me, “‘get over themselves’, inhabit their pronouns, hold the reigns, navigate, direct, or ease the painting’s journey to the most foreign seas that their painting will take them to. Otherwise the artist is a perpetual half arsed apprentice, on the rocks, caught in the era that they now temporarily inhabit.”
Dr Joseph Brennan is a Lambda Literary Award-nominated author based in Tropical North Queensland.
NAS Galleries
12 April to 1 June 2024
Sydney
